- cross-posted to:
- BoycottUnitedStates@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- BoycottUnitedStates@europe.pub
Summary
Trump has rejected the EU’s “zero-for-zero” tariff offer on cars and industrial goods, demanding instead that the bloc commit to purchasing $350 billion of American energy to offset the trade deficit.
Following his implementation of 20% tariffs on EU goods last week, which triggered significant market downturns, Trump indicated openness to negotiations while emphasizing his “America First” stance.
He also criticized EU product standards as “non-monetary barriers” designed to block American exports.
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This is just Mafia like extortion. It doesnt really matter now if/when these tariffs are undone - Trump has totally destroyed the US reputation as a reliable ally and trade partmer.
No deal with the US is worth the paper its written on, as everything is dependent on the whims of one person.
Presidential systems are sources of weakness and instabilty it seems. They’re no better than monarchs, and the whole system can easily be twisted into dictatorship. Look at Russia and now the US.
The EU are currently trying the carrot (offering zero for zero), Next comes the stick (targeted import and export tarrifs)… it would hurt the EU, but cripple the US.
Just tariff cloud stocks, watch everything crumble.
Coordinate with China on this shit. The EU and China may have their differences, but they have a common goal here and together they substantially outweigh the US
I think there is a possibility for an EU, China, Canada plus others… agreement to smooth over the gap from loss of US trade.
I don’t live anywhere in the northern hemisphere and I can’t say I know much about economy and international affairs. Which targeted tariffs you think the EU will impose that will cripple US?
Either tariff all big tech companies or just outright ban them from being allowed in the public sector. If you ban amazon, microsoft, google, meta, etc then the US economy will be in shambles. Big techs revenue is like ~10% of the total US GDP.
The EU will never ban them.
No, but the plan is floating around to tax EU used data for foreign companies right into unprofitablily.
And so will be almost every EU company/government/institution.
Nah. They have been preparing for this for years. There are ready to use replacement for most of the really important pieces of software. This would be the big push that was always needed to get technological independence from the US.
Horse shit to be frank. Aws and google cloud are huge and companies move slowly, if the top 100 euro companies decided to all get off these platforms now it would take months and months of unplanned intense effort and money
it would take months and months of unplanned intense effort and money
You know how much it costs EU taxpayers and customers to pay for the usage and licensing of US tech? Its absolutely absurd and most companies here are fed up with it. They will take any good alternative if its presented to them in a trustworthy manner.
The move to cloud based stuff was mostly vibes and marketing based. On prem has been shown to be cheaper, more reliable, more secure, more flexible.
Yes,I work in retail in IT , absolutely no cloud in use here 😉
Some of the companies I have been working with were already beginning to leave. The realization that cloud pricing will only go up AND being locked into it made them very wary. Some of the planning was already underway, this may only accelerate those plans.
Great for them, there will be a lot that only just got through their first painful migrations
They have been preparing? You sure about that?
Yup. Ignore all the buzzwords in this lol https://euro-stack.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/EuroStack_2025.pdf
The EU has been funding and pushing for locally run tech for a while. Matrix is increasingly becoming the base layer for all public sector communications for example. The biggest thing holding back locally developed stuff is just the easy availability of US based solutions. Take that out of the equation and people will just switch to the next best thing, which is usually not much of a downgrade.
Yes
More likely, they have been discussing about maybe starting official talks about what it would take to prepare, hypothetically.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives to most big tech services that could be setup quickly. I personally ditched Amazon (shop and video… AWS doesn’t depend on me personally) Meta and most of Google without sweating too much. Also, while convenient, none of their consumer tech is critical; we’ve lived without any of it until recently enough, so we could probably adapt to do without it for a while if we had to.
The parts I think (and I’m not an expert by any means) where Europe is completely vulnerable are payment/banking systems and advanced electronics.
On electronics, there’s also China, which isn’t a great alternative to depend on… But if Trump decided to weaponize SWIFT or the major credit cards, could he switch most of our banking system off?
SWIFT is actually European - Belgian in fact, it’s just that the US has an outsized influence through the dollar. Visa and Mastercard has several EU alternatives, the only caveat with them is that each of them only works in their respective countries.
Sounds like there won’t be any good faith negotiations with the US.
This sounds like BS, does the US even have enough capxitt or export $350 billion worth of energy (oil, LNG?).
Even I can sell $350B worth of energy if I increase the price enough.
That is one expensive AAA battery.
Too much effort. Just don’t deliver
But he said the tariffs were permanent. This was not a ‘negotiating’ tactic. Oh wait, he fucking lied, like he does every time he breathes. This is the “art of the deal”, AKA the bad deal. What an idiot bully con man. President Felon.
They basically are permanent if his alternative is the EU buying the entire GDP of Finland in extra LNG every year
What nobody realized is that the “art” in “art of the deal” was one of those modern “monkey threw feces at the wall” type of art pieces.
They don’t need $350B of US energy. why not sell something they need instead for forcing your customer to eat “McDonald’s” when they don’t need or want to.
Might as well force penguins to buy ice cube and snow made in US.
Also they dont “owe” the US anything. Trump has a cretinous understanding of economics.
He is all about win-lose
If they needed it, they’d have bought it. The whole point with all this is, to have the rest of the world buy stuff from the US, that they don’t neen or already buy from other places because it makes more sense. There is no logic - it is straight up blackmail
I’m pretty sure he knows they don’t need it and that that’s the point. He’s probably trying to force to buy stuff they don’t need in addition to the stuff they need, which they’ll buy anyway.
Honestly, pressuring someone into a purchase is how they start to think that maybe your products aren’t worth their perceived value. Otherwise, why the hard sell?
Art of the deal, my ass. I wonder if he can even feel embarrassment or if he simply hides it behind his “masterful leader” persona.
I really hope that EU will remain strong and not fall for any of this BS!
I think we should smoke that orange asshole out by immediately retaliating with the exact same percentage tariffs.
Get bent orange fuckface!
They should say “okay but only green energy, no oil or gas”
Ues, becoming energy dependent on this belligerent administration sounds like a great idea
It was ridiculous to see massive ships that took natural gas to Europe instead of using the huge gas pipes coming from Russia.
Ridiculous Ridiculous kids
Feeding money to Russia was madness and had to be stopped as a priority. Nothing ridiculous about it.
I know why they did it, but from a logical pov it hurt
Those gas pipes never stopped being used.
Or sabotaged…
Tell Russia that, the EU never turned them off or stopped ordering. It was Russia who turned them off to try to bully the EU.
